My friend Angela is one of those who has been brainwashed by this insidious advertising campaign. "It's amazing!" she said in a chipper monotone. "You walk into a room with four people and you walk out with five. It changes the energy of the whole group dynamic instantly."

I hate to quibble, but there are a lot less painful ways to perform this "miracle." If observing reproduction is such a primordial need of the human spirit, why not simply take married couples to the rodeo and show them forty or so tiny clowns emerging out of a Volkswagen?

Recently I saw photographs of the natural childbirth of my friends D. and R. The images burned their way onto my corneas. D. had assisted R. with the birth. Normally a strong man of jovial attitude and ruddy health and masculine good humor, D. looked like a 350-year-old vampire exposed to the equatorial sun at noon. He was straining with every ounce of his ability to prevent the listing of R.'s huge and rudderless body. R., with her eyes satanically rolled back in her head, appeared to be waging a brilliant battle against the father of her child. Thrashing wildly, she cursed in ancient tongues and screeched at "D." that she was going to tear his arms out of his sockets if he didn't give her drugs and let her out of the "natural" squatting position.

From there it only got worse. The next shots were festooned with dark, unidentifiable fluids. Midwives appeared, bringing to mind the final scene from "Carrie." When the child itself emerged, it held long tubes of shiny entrail in each fist and its toothless jaws were wide with deafening wrath, like an avenging gargoyle bent on the destruction of man. "Isn't she BEAUTIFUL?" cooed "R."

I marvelled at the speed with which the Vatican had dispatched its team of Manchurian Candidate-like experts. I imagined the flock of black cars pulling up in front of R.'s house, furtive bishops and cardinals in black overcoats, wraparound sunglasses and tall golden hats jumping out like a SWAT team and blasting through the front door. Once inside they had kept her sleep-deprived and shown her films such as "The Miracle of Life" and "My Mom's Havin' A Baby" and an onslaught of animated Disney classics, pumping her full of designer euphorics and lite jazz, until she had that glazed, stoned-out look of exhausted new-parent love. Then they released her into the world, changed, ready to spread their doctrine.

Alternatives must exist. Surely the brilliant minds in the field of genetic technology could cross our species with that of more dignified birth-giving creatures, such as female alligators. Alligators in the Everglades lay up to three dozen eggs, then cover them with mud and leaves and check up on them casually every now and then for nine weeks to see how they're coming along. The baby alligators either capably burst out of the shells themselves, seething with independent life force, or the mother bites the shell softly to give its more introverted infants a helping hand. If the egg is infertile and all yolky, the female alligator eats it: a waste-not, want-not solution.

Another attractive option is presented by sea turtles. Large turtles such as Kemp's ridley or the olive ridley migrate en masse to Costa Rican beaches in order to lay their eggs. When they are laid, the turtles bury them and crawl back into the sea. Only about one percent of the eggs laid ever become fully mature turtles. Even in an egg state, they must fight off fungi, larvae, crabs and Latin Americans who steal the eggs and sell them to local bars for $2 a dozen, where burly and lustful men eat them raw for their purported aphrodisiacal qualities.

Recently, environmentalists have been assisting the rather ill-thought-out reproductive habits of the sea turtle by surrounding the hatching baby turtles with large nets, then nudging them into the sea before the aforementioned predators can eat them. In return for this favor, the turtles would surely agree to help us out.

According to Dollo's Law, the irreversible nature of evolution prevents a species from fully reverting back to its ancestral condition. So we cannot independently revert to such asexual reproductive measures as splitting in two or shedding off a part of ourselves in order to produce offspring. Fortunately, such extreme measures will not be necessary. It should be no problem for scientists to devise a method by which human females can converge with sea turtles. Then all we gals will have to do is fly to Costa Rica, lay a bunch of ping-pong ball-sized eggs in the sand (a MUCH more humane and intelligent size than the standard human infant), and swim off into the clear blue water.

Environmental protection groups will supervise the eggs and protect them from bugs and coyotes, allowing the mothers to return in nine months or so to assist in the egg-crackings in the manner of the alligator. The unfertilized eggs would be given to the Latin American bar patrons.